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Enterprise IT executives committed to building private clouds will find no shortage of companies proclaiming their abilities to ease cloud management. Sorting through the list won't be easy, but Gartner lends a hand in its "Cool Vendors in Cloud Management, 2011," research report issued last week.

By no means exhaustive, by Gartner's own admission, the report highlights five "interesting, new and innovative" vendors: Abiquo, Adaptivity, DynamicOps, VMTurbo and Zimory. These companies share a common trait, which is their ability to manage infrastructure resources, Gartner says in the report.

Here are Gartner's quick product takes:

Abiquo Enterprise Edition, a hypervisor-agnostic, multi-tenant cloud infrastructure management product that provides delegated administration and the ability to set allocations and reservations for CPU, storage, memory and network resources. Abiquo Enterprise Edition should be of interest to enterprise IT operations staff and cloud architects who are experimenting with or have built solutions involving private or public cloud-based infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) environments for mixed workloads.

Adaptivity Blueprint4IT, a software suite for making IT hardware and software infrastructure planning and design more prescriptive and aligned to business requirements. Blueprint4IT is applicable, but not exclusive, to the cloud environment. It should be of interest to enterprises with large, complex IT environments looking to improve their infrastructure portfolio or to initiate a specific project that applies knowledge of the business process decomposition to the infrastructure.

DynamicOps Cloud Automation Center, software that provides the ability to manage and distribute workloads across far-flung data centers based on models. The multi-tenant software, which supports the Hyper-V, VMware and Xen hypervisors, includes a self-service interface, a business rules interface for governance, virtual and physical machine provisioning, compliance rules, plus chargeback and capacity management functionality. IT organizations can group physical resources and establish policies governing who can reserve and obtain capacity from these pools. DynamicOps Cloud Automation Center should be of interest to enterprises with hundreds or thousands of VMs that want more control and governance.

VMTurbo Virtualization Management Suite, which tries maximizing the return on cloud infrastructure investment through continuous monitoring and analysis of VM workloads against defined policies. It can identify current and projected resource problems, and enables automated remediation. In the enterprise, the product should be of interest to VMware and virtualization administrators and IT operations staff who want to reduce costs and provide enhanced support of mission-critical applications that execute in virtual environments.

Zimory connect and Zimory manage, data center software that lets users connect to VMs and storage services via a self-service portal, and provides the ability to create templates of, monitor and meter VM resources. Zimory connect is user-centric while Zimory manage is location-specific, providing the ability to control VM and data availability within specified or restricted locations. The Zimory offerings should be of interest to enterprise IT operations staff and cloud architects that are experimenting with or have built solutions around private or public cloud-based IaaS environments for mixed workloads.